Trusses are commonly used in the construction industry. Trusses are typically consisted of an upper chord element and a lower chord element inter connected by plurality of web members. Trusses are used in variety of structures from bridges to residential houses. Specially in buildings, it is common to combine identical trusses with equal spacing to create a load-resisting system such as roof of residential houses or frame of fabric buildings.
In the case of combining identical trusses, it is common to prefabricate the trusses in a manufacturing shop and transfer them as a whole unit or in several parts to the construction site. Prefabricating trusses provides superior quality control, cost efficiency and precision compared to the construction in the job site.
In some fields of application, such as housing and fabric buildings, truss manufactures provide a variety of pre-designed trusses with defined load capacity to be used in typical loading situations. Moreover, some truss manufacturers provide modular truss systems that can be combined to accommodate to variety of structural geometries. The modular systems, for example, are common in the field of pre-made tubular arched steel trusses used as the load resisting systems in fabric buildings.
In such cases the modular systems are optimised for a variety of typical loading scenarios; however, the optimization for every load combination is not possible. Therefore, there might be load cases that result in localized failure of one or a few elements of the truss assembly under extreme loading while the rest of the elements are still far from their maximum allowable capacity. Since factory-level customization of the truss for each individual case may not be cost effective, in most cases the solution is to increase the number of trusses in length of the building by reducing the bay spacing (i.e. the distance from one truss assembly to the next). This will result in a structure in which the majority of trusses are over-designed relative to their experienced loads just to correct overloading of a small subset of the trusses that might otherwise fail.
Therefore, this conventional practice of increasing the overall number of trusses and reducing the bay spacing between trusses can be considered inefficient from both a cost and materials standpoint.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide improved or alternative approaches to construction projects using prefabricated trusses.